View 776 Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Could this be the beginning of a new era?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent-testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after-all/

It purports to be an announcement of independent verification of low temperature fusion, with not merely measureable but commercially useful energy output.  I know little about any of this.

Mike Flynn sends this:

ADHD

You may find this interesting:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/05/20/why-american-kids-have-adhd-and-french-kids-dont/

MikeF

The thesis is that the symptoms of ADHD are real but not due to biological factors: ADHD can be “cured” by non-medical means. Thirty years and more ago a major pediatrician referred cases to me during the brief period in which I toyed with the idea of doing psychological consulting. The cases were bright boys who were not doing well in school. I was able to help them, but it was a lot of work and I had to charge a lot for doing it, and I discovered I’d rather write; I’d never set out to be any kind of practicing psychologist.

What I found in my few cases was that you can teach kids to control themselves.  I was pretty sure of that since I had to learn it myself: in my case the incentive was teachers with the legal power of corporal punishment.  Since my pediatrician partner did not want to use drugs, and I legally couldn’t prescribe anything, it was convince the kids their lives would be better if they developed better habits, or admit defeat.  As I said, hard work, too hard for me: I discovered that I am not going to save the world one boy at a time.  But I did learn, as I had thought, that the techniques I had used to teach myself back when I was in grade school can be taught to bright boys, but it takes time and patience.

That doesn’t mean that there are not cases of ADHD that require drugs; it does mean that neither I nor my pediatrician referral source found any.

The author of the Forbes article tends to blame the parents. I’d prefer to blame the culture. But it is interesting that as the influence of the DSM had grown, so have the number of cases of ADHD.

Thirty years ago a national commission on education concluded that “If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.”  We still have the same system of education, only now in Spades with Big Casino. It is not getting better, and the teachers unions are powerful enough to continue their war against the children of these United States of America.  For more http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/videos/?show=425168643

Basically we have surrendered. Those who can find niches of decent education in this vast wasteland. But we don’t take it seriously any more. We have given up.

The schools don’t even pretend to teach all the kids to read now.  They just have good reasons for why they didn’t learn.  And an increasing number can’t read but are pronounced literate because the can read at grade level, which means that they can read controlled vocabulary books. And the costs of this rotten system continue to rise, and the effects of bad grade schools reach up into the increasingly expensive universities, which have to try in four years to remedy twelve years of awful education.

For those who wonder if their children can read, try nonsense words on them. If your child in second grade or above cannot read monopolyastrid and conviducation, that child can’t read.  By read I mean look at the word and figure out how it is pronounced. And if your teacher tells you that isn’t what reading is, then you have a problem you will never solve by any kind of action inside the school system. Get a good reading program. The best one I know is my wife’s rather hokey old DOS program which clunkily works on any version of Windows. About seventy lessons of half an hour a lesson will do the job. After that it’s a matter of finding good and interesting books that kids like. I’ve written a few. There are a lot of them out there. But first they have to be comfortable at reading. Seventy lessons will do it, and it will last the rest of their lives. You don’t have to wait until second grade. English upper and upper middle class pupils were taught to read at age four by nannies, and that worked for a hundred years. English four year old protoplasm is no better than your kids’.

I still haven’t given up on meaningful school reform and here and there it happens, but by and large the battle is lost. The teaching colleges no longer teach their student teachers that kids can and should be expected to learn to read English before the end of first grade; and since they have never been taught to expect that result, they seldom get it. Reading instruction in college is mostly diagnosis of problems, i.e. learning good excuses for why you didn’t teach the child to read.  And the beat goes on.

View 774 Thursday, May 16, 2013

Interesting. President Obama today told the press that he had never heard of the Treasury Inspector General report on IRS involvement in selective examinations of tax exempt status applications, given green light treatment to those professing “progressive” or “Social responsibility” goals, but putting primary hampers on those who mentioned “swollen government”, “too big government”, “tea party” and other conservative notions. http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

The report wasn’t issued until May 14, but early copies were circulated well before that, and surely something of that importance – its public appearance caused the forced resignation of the Acting Director of the IRS – would have been known to any competent political advisors, and surely one of them would have leaked the information to the candidate. I understand the impetus to keep certain campaign knowledge from the candidate, and every political manager must deal with it: What the bosses don’t know can’t hurt them, they can deny it with good conscience. I don’t suppose there has ever been a political campaign without some such incidents. But once the campaign is over, and particularly when word of the shenanigan gets out to investigative reporters, there’s always a frantic scramble to cover things up, and at some point the top campaign managers must be told, and one of them has to tell the politician. The boss is, after all, the boss.

Now there was an Iron Law of Bureaucracy incentive in spades with big casino here: enemies of Big Government are by definition personal enemies of IRS bureaucrats. Pournelle’s Iron Law states that in every bureaucracy there will be two major factions, one dedicated to the goals for which the organization was formed (class room teachers who want the kids to learn as an easy example) and the other faction dedicated to the organization itself (teacher’s union executives); and the second faction always gains control of the organization. This is true of every bureaucracy, including the IRS, the FBI, the AFL-CIO, the General Services Administration, NASA, your local police force, your local fire department, the local PTA, and almost anything else you can think of, and if you think of a bureaucracy that doesn’t fit, wait a bit. So to any IRS bureaucrat organizations that say that the government is too big will be the enemy, and while Type One bureaucrats would resist the temptation to get out the red tape, Type Two bureaucrats would order a barrel full with some gusto.

Thus it’s hardly astonishing that people who want to control the growth of government would receive extra scrutiny from the IRS career civil servants. It’s even less astonishing that the political campaign workers (alas, with the gutting of the Hatch Act there is now considerable overlap) would simply smile and say nothing when they observed this sort of thing. But I would find it astonishing if no word of this reached the higher ranks of the President’s political campaign management within a year or more. Someone in the White House staff knew. The question is, how high up did the knowledge go? There is no evidence that Nixon knew everything or even very much about the machinations of Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson in their “plumber squad” operations; the point is that he should have. He should have had in his top entourage at least one who would tell him what was being done in his name. Every CEO needs information sources other than the chain of command. Of course this President has little experience at management at any level.

I am not involved in breaking news stories, but as the facts become clear it’s important to understand them; there is more than politics involved here.

The original Hatch Act (upheld more than once by the Supreme Court) forbade civil service employees from engaging in political activities, and was usually interpreted as forbidding government workers who were “Hatched” from even being asked for political donations by anyone else. Of course the original theory of a civil services was to divorce it from politics while retaining responsibility to the public. That is a very narrow path to follow: if the public doesn’t like what a bureaucracy is doing, how can that be changed? The answer is supposed to be to change the political control, but if the bureaucrats are protected from political management stalemate takes place. This is easily observed in a great many places at all levels of government. An example is our usual example of a needless government activity, Department of Agriculture Inspectors who attend stage magic presentations to be sure that if the magician uses a rabbit in the performance, he has a Federal license to do so. There is probably no political appointee in the Department of Agriculture or anywhere else in the Federal Government who would defend this as a necessary activity during times of deficit financing; but the practice has continued for years, and likely will continue forever because there is no simple mechanism for ending it.

The Hatch Act worked fairly well for decades. The theory was that the civil service protections were strong, and accepting them required the civil servant to essentially give up political activity: you’re paid to implement policies, not to advocate for them. For younger readers this may seem like an astonishing statement, but that used to be the case, and every campaign manager knew it and acted accordingly.

Perhaps restoring the Hatch Act to its original intent and even strengthening it is order.

It’s time for lunch. Here’s something else to think about.

SUBJ: More on the the FBI’s Martha Stewart tactic

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/14/fbi-well-decide-when-you-are-lying-to-us

Another example of the Iron Law at work. Most FBI special agents are precisely what they appear to be and what most of us grew up to expect of G-men; but the Iron Law continues to move in favor of gathering more power.

Cannibalism in Syria

Just in case anyone in your audience had any illusions about the war there.

http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/

http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/atrocities-will-be-televised-they-syrian-war-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse/

Of course, before one judges the man too harshly one must consider this fact about his victim:

"In an interview conducted via Skype in the early hours of May 14, al-Hamad explained to TIME what caused him to cut out the soldier’s organs: “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.”

The upshot is that it appears that humans on both sides have been made into monsters by the war. And that raises a problem: When this orgy of killing, murder, and cannibalism finally subsides, the people who fought in this won’t instantly turn into civilized saints and go back to pumping gas or selling cars. No, I suspect that when the war in Syria is over the barbarized winners will make trouble elsewhere in the middle east as well. At this point I suspect it doesn’t matter who wins — whatever comes out is going to be horrible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It was, of course, inevitable.  George Washington warned us against getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe, and from entering into entangling alliances. Our strategy of Containment required that we have alliances and that we become involved in territorial disputes; if you are going to contain communism, you have to contain it, and sometimes that involves sending Americans to Korea and Viet Nam. The problem with containment is that it is a form of attrition, and strategies of attrition work much better against democracies than against one-party systems. The rulers of a one-party system don’t feel the effects so very much, while the costs are shared in a democracy. After 1980 the US added a strategy of technology to accompany Containment, and it all worked extraordinarily well: in 1986 there was still evidence that we were headed for a CoDominium with the USSR surviving well into the 21st Century, but that didn’t happen. Once the Soviets understood that we would not disarm ourselves with “Arms Control” but were dedicated to neutralizing their most expensive weapons, things rapidly came apart over there. Arthur Koestler had long before said that a sufficient condition for the collapse of a totalitarian state would be the free exchange of ideas within it.  That might have been an overstatement but it contained much truth, and the small computer revolution faced the Soviet leadership with an impossible dilemma: forfeit the technology race, which was clearly military suicide (clear after the Falkland Islands War) or open up the society to free discussion. Gorbachev tried Glasnost while maintaining communism, the Old Guard tried to eject him by force, and the short insurrection that followed ended the USSR as such. The Seventy Years War aka the Cold War was ended.

Alas, the US had become addicted to projecting power overseas. The USSR, having won (by default when the US withdrew after Watergate) Viet Nam tried for Afghanistan; the result of that action was instructive to those who study war. It was not instructive to the leaders of the United States, who decided to exert the power of this Republic to restore the “legitimate” government of Kuwait after this artificial Kingdom was seized by Saddam Hussein. Then after 9/11 we intervened again into Middle Eastern affairs.  Quick Victory in Afghanistan was followed by an inane decade of “nation building”.  The Baathists were turned out in Iraq but we could find no one to take over, and the artificial of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Nationalists broke into pieces, with barbarism taking over in much of the area.

There have been other events in the Middle East, and US attempts to exert power in order to preserve civilization in them. They have not been notably successful. We projected power into the Balkans with the less than favorable results. A side result was to earn the thorough dislike of the Russians whose long history of dedication to Slavic interests seems to have escaped the geniuses of the State Department. We intervened in Egypt and in Libya. In all cases we didn’t do much: the lesson of Iraq was that we couldn’t afford to exert the power of the republic. The cost was too high. We do not have a generation of soldiers to send overseas.  But of course that was predictable.

Stephen Vincent Benet was a pacifist. His pacifism was shaken by Hitler and World War II, and he wrote in intellectual defense of opposing Germany. He did not live to see the peace after the war.

His view was that war never led to good results. This is not true, and he realized it before he died, but his vision of the consequences of war was never one of rosy optimism. There may be reasons to seek out and destroy dragons, but such actions have consequences. Sometimes it no longer matters much who wins.  Here is Benet on war, published in 1935.

Nightmare With Angels

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professional-historical-economic and  irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model-T or even an early Napier,
They’d have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow.
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And Peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World!"

He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of
Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc,
and a dozen other scientists, writers,  and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there’d never  been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church  of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace)
like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!

Take it nearer home," he said.
Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their  great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a   green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skillful, certainly they created.
And in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on 
  the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully til Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet, and gunpowder
  and they had to get  married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skills, the handsome folk, the excellent
  scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucious, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander –
Just to name half a dozen –
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for gasmasks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator, nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In Fact, you will not be saved."
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and armies sprang up.

Stephen Vincent Benet

As I expect all of you know, I am no pacifist; but I am a student of history. And when we send our armies out to remake the world, I cannot help but be reminded of Ortega y Gasset, and his tale of the story of Napoleon reviewing his troops. “See my soldiers, how splendid, how the light glistens on their bayonets.”  To which Talleyrand replied, “Sire you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.” Once the bayonets have destroyed the firm seat, restoring a new one may be more difficult than supposed. There was a good reason for John Quincy Adams to say that America is the friend of liberty everywhere but the guardian only of our own. He understood that he who defends everything defends nothing, and those who undertake to defend the rights of all the people in the world may end by finding the coast was their own liberty. We can break things and kill people. Rebuilding is a more difficult job, and we learned the wrong lesson from our accomplishments with Germany and Japan after World War Two. We cannot rescue everyone and when we find what the cost has been, who rescues us? It is no small thing to be a free society and defend that freedom. The thing about defending our own liberty is that it generally increases our power. When we go out to slay foreign dragons, the cost can be far greater than we think – and we may not be the ones who pay it.

Mike Flynn calls my attention to this:

New system could predict solar flares, give advance warning

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers may have discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, providing advance warning to help protect satellites, power grids and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation.

The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements "decay," or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.

The new detection technique is based on a hypothesis that radioactive decay rates are influenced by solar activity, possibly streams of subatomic particles called solar neutrinos. This influence can wax and wane due to seasonal changes in the Earth’s distance from the sun and also during solar flares, according to the hypothesis, which is supported with data published in a dozen research papers since it was proposed in 2006, said Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University professor of physics.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2012/Q3/new-system-could-predict-solar-flares,-give-advance-warning.html

Of course the notion of variable decay rates in radioactive substances is startling to those of us brought up on the notion that it is invariable. So we have neutrinos, which no one can find, changing the decay rates that can’t be changed; but if all that works we may be able to have some advance warning of events that may destroy our civilization. A brave new world.

And to end the day on a cheerful note, our galaxy won’t collide with Andromeda for about a billion years. But here’s the picture of the day.

Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations, 

Jerry

APOD: 2013 May 14 – Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130514.html

It is very cool.

Ed

View 774 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

This is Wednesday, and all the Windows computers here need updating. For reasons I do not understand, the Windows 8 machine wants to be told to do the updates including the resetting although it says that it does it automatically. That is, there is a screen that says updates are automatically installed, but if I manually tell it to update I am told there wre 13 critical updates do I want to do them now?, and if I do I get to download them, and after downloading install them, and then I get to tell the machine to restart or it will do it in a week or so without my having to tell it so. Now it may be that I have insufficiently pored over the Help files and other instructions for Windows 8 and my cursory look is insufficiently informed. I no longer spend about half my time mucking about with small computers, so that I do all these silly things so you don’t have to. Still, I have had some experience with these little machines over the years, and you’d think that I could get the automatic updates setting right on Windows 8 – but I don’t.

Now true, the machine is in sleep mode on Tuesday nights, and it’s not my primary machine. My primary machines are two older Windows 7 machines, and on Wednesday Morning when I sit down at my desk they will both be asking me to log in, having done their updates during the night. They’ll want me to log in. When I do that all is well and over, for them, and for me I know to go to Alien Artifact, a Windows 7 system that will have been in deep sleep for days, and get his started on his updates; and then go tend Swan, our very powerful Windows 8 system, and tenderly bring her into update condition, and that’s going to take some personal attention until it’s done. I suppose I should make an effort to find out what’s going on, and perhaps I will; but meanwhile, take this as a reminder to wake up all your sleeping machines and update them.

When Windows does an update, this is a signal to all the hackers to update their software, since there will be new fixes to older hacks, and sometimes fixes to hacks not yet loose in the wild, and that means there are millions of machines vulnerable to those hacks. Hacking is a big business now, and some of the best computer scientists in the world are employed by those interested in penetrating your computer and using it for various nefarious purposes. If you are lucky you might be taken over by a concern that merely uses your system to forward a ton of spam, and if you’re really lucky the proprietor will not only install his control software, but another virus that protects you from other hackers. There are concerns out there that do that. There are even rumored to be some who recognize that a machine has already been hacked, and stop trying to get this one – a sort of professional courtesy. And then there are those who update the scripts they sell to script kiddies who use them to try to start their own companies of zombies they can rent out.

In other words, it’s dangerous out there, and keeping your systems up to date is the first – but not the only – line of defense.

Be safe.

So having gone the rounds of the Chaos Manor computers to get them properly updated, I sat down to the mail, to find this the first mail in my inbasket.

Tried to have sex with a hornet’s nest

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http://nyheternasverige.se/forsokte-ha-sex-med-getingbo-avled/

No matter what I’m exposed to, no matter how many times I think I’ve seen or heard it all, somebody tops it. The big, neon, flashing lighted sign in my head reads "What did you think was going to happen?"

I hope this is some sort of weird joke.

Graves

Have a nice day.

The IRS scandal develops. The White House insists that no instructions came from there. Here is the official report of the Inspector General.

http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

I have made only a cursory inspection, and found no surprises.

We are awaiting the President’s speech on the IRS mess.  The official story is that two lower level IRS employees in Ohio took it upon themselves to delay the applications for tax exempt status of all groups using the word “Patriot” or the phrase “Tea Party” or other libertarian/conservative code words in their title or statement of purpose, while expediting those who claimed to be “progressive” or “responsible.” There was no knowledge of this at higher levels,k and certainly none at the political level.  It was all a matter of low level professionals.

Of course that opens the question of the civil service.  If a nation cannot control its bureaucracies, perhaps a spoils system with naked political appointments would be preferable, because that way at least you get political responsibility: everyone knows who appointed his ward leader as Commissioner of Public Roads, and if you want a road past you house you elect someone who lives near you. That way eventually you get your road, whereas with a bureaucracy you never get a road.   A politically responsible system would be able to remove the bunny inspectors after a few years of ridicule but in fact it has been several years and they are still inspecting stage magician performances to insure that if the magician uses a pet rabbit in the performance he has a Federal License to do so, and no, I am not making that up.  Indeed, if the magician geeks the rabbit – slays it with his teeth and eats it raw – he may be in violation of state or local laws, but the Federal Inspector of the Department of Agriculture has no jurisdiction, whereas if he uses the rabbit in the performance and keeps it as a pet, he must have a Federal License to do so.

The President is speaking now, and he will fix it, and see to is that nothing like this will ever happen again, and it was never anyone in his staff who ordered it, and it’s all going to be all right, and trust him. It was outrageous and inexcusable and it will never happen again, and the acting head of the IRS has resigned, and it is all going to be all right. The perpetrators have been “disciplined” but so far have not been identified nor discipline defined.

So it goes. More breaking news. There is a link between the two people in Cincinnati and the acting director of the IRS (who has resigned). Too much for me to follow.  The President took no questions and left after promising to make everything all better.  And of course he may well be completely sincere. But someone in his campaign staff knew exactly what was going on.  The story is not yet over.

The Tea Party frightened the campaign to reelect the president, and someone took steps to place a primary hamper on the Tea Party after 2010. Who knew what, and when did they know it?  Those who lived through the Watergate investigations will remember all this…

IRS Scandal expands to EPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI53kkF-WGM&feature=youtu.be

John David Galt

And now there are stories of leaks from tax returns to political groups.  The old Nixon Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) never went this far. One wonders what the media will make of all this. The last time, a President resigned.  That isn’t likely here.

And I don’t know about any of this:

[Link formerly here deleted as it does not lead where I thought it did.]

We have a case in Los Angeles of a guy who was curious about bombs so he built some. He never exploded one, nor threatened to.  He just wanted to see if he could do it.

Having done something of that sort at age 14 – I am sure there is a statute of limitations at work here – I suppose I have a bit of sympathy. Of course I made mine down by the hog pond having turned the hogs out into a previously harvested cornfield, and he was working in a city apartment, so I suppose it’s right that he be charged with endangerment – but if he wants to volunteer for the Army bomb squad I’d let him go do it. Rather see him there than in jail…

I see on tonight‘s news that sexual harassment in the military is now one of the gravest of problems.  It must be “solved.”

Of course a long time ago this was predicted as an inevitable consequence of making military service a “right” and sexually integrating the services.  It was unfair to women to exclude them from any part of the military, and any attempt to segregate the sexes was just wrong.

Of course the purpose of a military is to break things and kill people; to win battles; and the kind of people who do that are not always those we want as our neighbors.  The French long ago created the Foreign Legion for that purpose. They never though of making membership a right, and ringing women into the Legion barracks.

It is certainly the case that women can do many of the functions of military forces.  It is also true that one has to have career paths for the troops at the sharp end.  When the fighting me begin to think it unfair that women are promoted over them through a quota system, that has an effect.  If your goal is to have a sexually integrated service with no segregation of the sexes while also having no sexual harassment you may have set yourself a more difficult task than you think.

It may be easier to win battles than to integrate your armed forces without sexual harassment. History doesn’t show many successful military forces with sexual integration – except of course the present one. Which, we are now told, suffers from an intolerable problem of sexual harassment that must be rooted out of the system.  And of course full sexual integration of the forces requires that mothers be sent overseas at the need of the unit, not making much allowance for the needs f the children – who are future citizens and future warriors.

I know that women can perform many of the military functions, and probably do some of them better than men can. But to try to erase sexual differences while building an invincible military has yet to be done; and the flurry of complaints about sexual harassment suggest that it’s not going as well as we would like it to.  Yes, certainly, it’s a lovely ideal and we have had some movies based on the notion of absolute equality of the sexes in military forces.  We have rather fewer examples of battles and wars won by forces that enforce absolute egalitarianism.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. The Navy has a long experience of men at sea; rather less than men and women at sea; if it’s going to work anywhere it should be in the Navy and perhaps the Air Force.  We’ll see,  But is the goal to win battles or to demonstrate sexual integration?

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.  James Burnham made that observation log ago, and as the Soviet Union collapsed we all forgot it.  Let’s hope that we know how to bring this off and build a thoroughly integrated force that wins battles and can be deployed when and where it is needed.

View 773 Friday, May 10, 2013

The pledge drive continues, and thanks to all those who have opened new subscriptions or renewed their old ones. This site operates on the Public Radio plan, meaning that it is free to all, but it remains open only as long as it gets enough subscribers to keep it open. If you have not subscribed this would be a good time to do it. And if you haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a great time…

The good news is that I pretty well confine my appeals to pledge week, and I don’t do pledge weeks until KUSC, the LA classical music station, does theirs. And I don’t do advertisements. As I said, the Public Radio model…

There is a bit of a lull in news about the Benghazi affair. It is the duty of the Congress to act as the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and we have the death of our ambassador to explain and policies to prevent this sort of thing to develop.

Subject: The Benghazi Incident

Jerry, as you can probably guess, I’m not exactly a fan of our current president. However, in this case, I can only find one fault with what he did: in my opinion, at least, he turned the job over to the wrong person. This isn’t a matter of 20/20 hindsight; if I’d been asked at the time who should be in charge, I’d have said the same thing: he should have given the job to the Secretary of the Navy.

I say this for two reasons. First, the Navy was almost certainly going to be doing the job, so you might as well give them control. Second, it’s a long-standing tradition that the President can commit the Navy (and, of course, the Marines) on his own authority, but using the Army requires Congressional approval. In this case, of course, I can’t know how effective any intervention would have been, but I’m sure that something would have been done, and the Marines would have been as eager to land at Benghazi as they were on the shores of Tripoli.

Joe

That’s pretty close to my view. Of course what came after that, with the cover-ups and the talking points, and the rest is a bunch of political nonsense designed to obscure facts, but the simple truth seems to be that the President was in over his head, understood that, and turned it over to people who had convinced him they were smart enough to handle their jobs. I am disappointed in Panetta: he had the authority. Why didn’t he use it? As to handing it to the Navy, we are very much in agreement.

Bring back the Iwo Jima

Jerry,

LHD 7 is still out there.

http://www.iwo-jima.navy.mil/

She has the 26th MEU embarked now http://www.navy.mil/local/lhd7/

Dan Greif

Actually the present Iwo Jima is a new ship built to replace the old LPH Iwo Jima, which it did well. It is supposed to be in the Mediterranean and had it been anywhere near Syrtis Major could have easily handled the Benghazi situation. It is a great puzzlement that given unrest in the area and the deployment of the US Ambassador from Tripoli over to Benghazi there were no support assets over there. The USS Tripoli, an Iwo Jima class LPH, was my son’s first sea deployment ship back during the Somalia incidents. She and the Iwo Jima have been scrapped.

The new Iwo Jima is Wasp class, and a bit fancier than the LPH Iwo Jima. It is more capable but also more expensive.

My point mostly was that if we are going to act as if we are the great superpower of the world, the original analysis of Cold War days leasing to the assessment of a requirement for a rapid response force that could inject a battalion of Marines anywhere along the shorelines seems relevant, although certainly needs revision from the time I worked on that problem in the 1950’s. If we are going to meddle in Arab affairs we need a force majeure that can react swiftly to get our agents out fast: few terrorist groups or even local militias care to face a full battalion of helicopter-supported Marines, and sending enough force is usually the best way to avoid actual combat.

Think of this as a ramble. I haven’t thought in detail about these matters for a while because I do not have access to operational details, and it’s details that dictate the actual force requirements. On a strategic level, it’s clear that if we are going in meddle in Arab affairs we need a way to get the meddlers out of there at need.

Changing earth

http://news.yahoo.com/stunning-30-year-timelapse-shows-earth-s-changing-surface-161911528.html

My first thought was, what was the position of the moon each day these were taken.

Was the tide in or out?

A daily overlay might be a better example.

B

Glacial advances and retreats are more a function of rainfall than temperature, and that tends to change in cyclical ways. The rain/drought cycles change across the world. But those are striking pictures, and there’s a good bit to think about.

Regarding your recent columns, there is a successor planned for Hipparchos, Gaia, scheduled to be launched this October by the ESA. It should be capable of doing parallax measurements to some tens of thousands of light years, and easily refine/confirm/refute current "standard candle" definitions.

-Ed

I wonder about the accuracies at that distance, but it should get astronomy back to observations and data, not theoretical  calculations. In particular we can verify the size of the Andromeda Nebula, and thus its absolute brightness, which will help a lot with detgermining distance to far distant nebulae.

Yesterday was spent with Niven, mostly working. And now I have to pay the bills.